By Greg Dobbs

Greg Dobbs hosting television coverage of a NASA Shuttle launch.

When I’m sick, I want the world’s best health care as much as anybody. But I wasn’t real optimistic that I’d get it a couple of weeks ago when, on my way to shoot a television documentary, I suffered a significant amount of internal bleeding aboard an overnight flight. Collapsing twice after we landed from massive blood loss, evidently I almost died.

That’s why I’m ecstatic to report that my fears of inferior care were ill-founded. In fact I’m ecstatic to be around to report anything at all. But I am, and here’s one of the reasons why: an expensive and innovative (Israeli-designed) tool I had to swallow called the PillCam. 36 hours after launching on a fantastic journey through the length and depths of my digestive system, collecting almost 60,000 diagnostic images inside me to pinpoint the source of my bleeding, the PillCam successfully completed its mission.

The thing is, this 21st Century marvel wasn’t at the internationally-famous Mayo Clinic, or the vaunted Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, or the top-rated New York Presbyterian. No, it was at the big, battle-tested, National Health Service trauma center in Belfast, Northern Ireland called Royal Victoria Hospital, which I knew from covering the warfare in Northern Ireland in the 70s and 80s for ABC News.

Pillcam ~10mm X 25mm in size

Frankly, that’s why I had felt so low about what I faced. The Royal Vic was for victims of external bombings, not internal bleeding. What’s worse, I was being thrust into the hands of the cash-strapped budget-dependent National Health Service, and I would be hospitalized in the long-war-torn city of Belfast. I’ll admit, I was scared.

It wasn’t a perfect experience. I felt lost in the chaos of the emergency room. I had bloodlines spring leaks where they were inserted in my arms. I heard fellow patients around me screaming all night. And while recovering, I was presented with a couple of plates of food I wouldn’t pay for at a restaurant. But you know what? It’s a hospital. As a veteran of a few other life-threatening traumas, I’ve suffered the same at institutions in the U.S.

More important, just as I have in American hospitals, I had the high-tech procedures I needed when I needed them. Two angiograms, two endoscopies, CT scans, x-rays, a colonoscopy, and that tiny alien capsule that traveled through me, the PillCam. Some argue that in a universal healthcare system (which critics would call a euphemism for “socialized medicine”), you’ll only get urgent care if you have urgent needs. Well, about ten years ago when my back collapsed and I was reduced to crawling around my house with screaming pain until I could have some vertebrae fused, I’d say the need was pretty urgent. But it took a week-and-a-half to get me into surgery. That was in suburban Denver.

Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital

The bottom line is, maybe it’s socialized medicine but the doctors and nurses and procedures and protocols were first rate; they saved my life. I have pre-existing conditions, which disqualify me for most insurance at home. Here? Except for personal medical histories to help treat me, no one even asked. In fact, the bureaucracy is so minimal and the priorities so different, no one ever even asked to see an ID card to prove who I am, let alone a credit card to prove my ability to pay!

And the cost? The “emergency” parts — the ambulance, the ER, the transfusions — came with no charge. The rest? Since I only went to Belfast to shoot a television news segment and don’t pay taxes and thus am not insured, I’ll pay alright, but since the model for hospital revenue isn’t based on market-driven, sometimes price-gouging profit centers, I won’t pay through the nose. If you think it’s no different in the U.S., you’re not paying attention. Market-driven healthcare systems certainly provide the best … but a big downside is cost.

And here’s the biggest difference between the two healthcare systems: the one in the U.K. is open for everybody. Residents don’t have to assess and agonize over the cost because they don’t have insurance. If they need medical care at any level, they just go. As I did. And get fixed. As I am.

And guess what: anyone who doesn’t like their universal healthcare system and wants something more can have it, through private insurance, if they’re willing and able to pay for it. Just like us. Socialized medicine? It’s not perfect, but then, neither is ours. This system saved my life. That’s good enough for me.
 

Best moment:

The best moment for all of us was climbing the mountain called Wayna Picchu, which towers over Machu Picchu, and then looking down on the remarkable 15th century Inca community. My personal favorite was seeing my sons racing (and wheezing) up the dirt paths at 14,000 feet on the island of Amantani, which sits in the world’s highest lake, Titicaca. Even the locals thought they were loco.

What I learned:

I learned in Peru what I have previously learned in historically magical nations like China and Egypt: People today might not have the most advanced or prosperous societies, but they have deep and abiding pride in their ancestors and their achievements.

Best meal:

In the “White City” of Arequipa, we were wandering through a poor part of town and came to an outdoor café with a handful of tables. We were hungry, so we gave it a try. They serve only one dish: ceviche. It was the best any of us had ever had.

Most fun:

There is hiking around almost every corner in the Andes of Peru. What’s fun is how hard it is — and the Incas who did it regularly were only half our size.

Don’t miss:

Machu Picchu. Seeing what an organized, civilized community the Incas built atop a mountain six centuries ago will blow your mind. Maybe your lungs, too.

Best tip:

Don’t be afraid of the food; eat it! None of us suffered; to the contrary, we savored.

We’re at no loss for confidence from presidential candidates, most of whom are baby boomers, about how good things will be if they win. But I’ll tell you in a moment why they’ve all got it wrong.

First, the Republicans, the ones who’ve managed to stay in the race? They promise us that if elected, they will trash whatever Barack Obama has done and put America back on the path to prosperity.

For his part, President Obama has the same playbook but a different strategy: he will build on what he already has done to keep America on the path back to prosperity.

Greg Dobbs, veteran television correspondent, on location in Moscow.

Good luck to both sides. If there’s one thing on which we all can agree, it is that we like prosperity, and want as much as we can get. But you know what? No matter who wins in November, it won’t primarily be his policies that get us there. And here’s the proof: while our economy went south under the policies of the last Republican president, we didn’t see an eye-popping U-turn to the north under the policies of the incumbent Democrat. Some would translate that to read, a pox on both their houses.

Yet America will recover, or continue its recovery (depending on who you talk to). But it won’t be because of our ability to manufacture hard goods any more; sure, what we do build we now build well and if you include petroleum, we are still the biggest producer of goods and services in the world. But as we have seen since we became the leading generation in this country, although a little more manufacturing is coming back to our shores from overseas, by and large, it’s still cheaper to build things elsewhere.

Rather, we will find prosperity because of an intangible quality I’ve always had trouble getting my head around…until now. It’s called innovation. Inventiveness. Entrepreneurial brainpower. And by and large, baby boomers have been the driving force. But what I’ve never gotten my head around was, how do those characteristics translate to prosperity? What good does it do us to imagine great things if we aren’t actually turning them into something solid?

And then I read this headline: “App Economy has created 466,000 jobs.” That’s the “app economy” as in “Angry Birds,” “Facebook,” “CNN.com,” apps that give you the world via the smartphone, the tablet, and the social media. The online piece under the headline— reporting a study by TechNet, a think tank for high-tech corporations — likened the “App Economy” to “a 21st Century construction sector.” That’s when the little light went off in my head: we still build things, but we don’t buy them off the shelf any more at the mall and, standing alone, we don’t even hold them in our hands.

No, what we do today to stay at the apex of global commerce is innovate, then turn those innovations, however physically intangible, into something that people can actually use. And if you doubt that, consider this: today there are something like a million apps out there in the marketplace, and every day the number grows. Lest you think they’re mostly games that fling birds into buildings, think again: according to TechNet’s report, “Every major consumer-facing company… discovered that they need an app to be the public face of the business.” In other words, “app” employment is the construction sector for the 21st Century because apps have become the front door we walk through to do business.

Oh, our next president — and all the politicians down the pyramid — will claim credit for our prosperous future. But truth be known,they don’t have nearly so much to do with it as they used to. And that’s a good thing. We don’t have to depend on dysfunctional elected officials to find prosperity; we only have to depend on ourselves.

Greg Dobbs in a training capsule.

A lot of Americans have strong opinions about the end of the shuttle program. Which means, when the last shuttle has touched down and its wheels have turned for the last time, there will surely be debate about the space program. Is this the end of our best days in space, or just a transition? My answer is, transition. Here’s why:

1. One of the reasons NASA is retiring the space shuttle is to put the money that has been spent going into low earth orbit into new technologies to get us where we want to go next. Our spacecraft have been propelled primarily by the same technology for more than 40 years. If we want to go the distance in the 21st Century — back to the moon, to Mars, to an asteroid — we need new materials, new fuels; the idea that intrigues me the most is about beaming energy up from the ground.
2. The space industry won’t be concentrated any more at NASA, but it has new horizons which probably will result in more innovation than we’ve seen in a long time, which means more spin-offs to make our daily lives better. It will absorb at least some of the “rocket scientists” who are leaving NASA. Private companies already are developing spacecraft to take our astronauts to and from the space station so that we don’t have to forever rely, as we shall for the next few years, on the Russians. The only difference from how we’ve built spacecraft in the past is, they’ll take the financial risk; NASA will just pay them to fly the missions. Critics fear sloppy standards, but private enterprise always has been behind American spacecraft; NASA doesn’t have much more than a screwdriver and a wrench in its inventory. Anyway, NASA won’t certify a ship unless it satisfies NASA’s standards.

Space shuttle launch.

Recently in Washington, I asked NASA’s Administrator, Charlie Bolden, why we’re not rushing back to the moon. His answer was, no matter who gets to the moon next, they’ll find that there already are six flags planted there, and they’re all ours.

There certainly will be some brain drain. Some experts think that could be fatal to our future in space. But recently I also interviewed Scott Carpenter, America’s fourth man in space, only the second to go orbital, after John Glenn. Since he’s been around since Day One and seen gaps in the past between one program and another, I asked him about all these fears and his answer was, “We’ll recover. There’ll be a time when we progress at a slower rate but we’ll recover.” I then asked how we’ll do that and he said, “Re-invigorate the national goal of flying to Mars.” When I asked why that’s important, he answered with the kind of pioneer spirit that got us to where we are: “Because it is inevitable that we will go there. That’s what humans do.”

Alan Shepard ... 50 years ago.

Charlie Bolden’s predecessor running NASA, Michael Griffin, used to evangelize that the other over-arching argument to push deeper into space is that throughout history, the nations that put their men and money into ships that sailed across uncharted oceans became the leading nations of their times. Not to mention beneficiaries of the riches with which those ships came home.

We don’t know what’s ahead, but think about this: Alan Shepard became the first American in space just over fifty years ago, when even the oldest of us baby boomers were just teenagers. He lifted off in a capsule that was all of 11-1/2 feet high and just over six feet across. It weighed about five thousand pounds. He traveled just over 300 miles, reaching an apogee of 116 miles and a speed of about 5,000 mph. The whole sub-orbital flight lasted less than sixteen minutes, from liftoff to splashdown in the Atlantic. Compare those numbers to the space shuttle.

My point is, no one then could even imagine a spaceship that lifted off like a rocket and landed like an airplane … let alone all the byproducts of the space age that we use in our everyday lives. Maybe I should be worried about where we’re headed now. But I’m not.

December 2010

Dear Family and Friends,

Greg on the left with cameraman Jim VanVranken.

Often when I finally leave a story, I find myself picturing some of the key people I’ve met, even long after I’ve gotten home. Just in the past year for example, I still sometimes think of the Colombian soldiers with whom last Spring, along with a crew from HDNet, I dropped down from combat helicopters into the damp wet jungle, the soldiers’ job being to take out camouflaged cocaine labs and fight off the bad guys who resist. And of the remarkably inspiring young man on whom I shot a piece in California and Connecticut, the man born with no arms and no legs, but hardly hampered by his shortcomings. There are still people I think about in the Middle East with whom I’ve spent time and admittedly grown empathetic, who struggle every day of their lives simply to survive, in ways the average American cannot begin to imagine. And those I saw a year ago in Vietnam, whose bodies are gruesomely mangled, apparently from absorbing the dioxin, Agent Orange, that we unknowingly used during the war there. It destroyed some American soldiers too.

Well, for the past week and a bit, I’ve been in Mexico, and there are two groups of people here who will stick with me a while. One is the group of men (and a handful of women) who staff oil rigs far from the shore in the Gulf of Mexico, literally isolated on a single rig for in some cases 14, in others 28 days at a stretch. The other people I won’t soon forget is a group of women — society’s dregs — who live in a damp cold house in one of the poorest and most dangerous parts of the city, but for whom the place is a refuge from the world they inhabited most of their sorry lives; it is a charitable home for retired prostitutes.

Let me begin with the oil rigs. Our story is this: back in the early 1970s, a fisherman from a place on the country’s southernmost Gulf coast called Ciudad del Carmen started noticing oil mucking up his nets. He thought for a while it might be leaking from a passing ship, but it continued, and continued, and if anything, got thicker. Eventually, the story goes, he contacted Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company (the name is short for Petroleos Mexicanos), and what they figured out was that there was crude oil coming up from the sea floor. Lots of it. Within just a few years they had rigs out in the water to exploit the oil, and they called the rich find “Cantarell.” Why? Because that was the fisherman’s name: Rudecindo Cantarell.

It’s only appropriate that they named the area after him, because thanks to the couple of hundred huge Pemex platforms that have been working there for more than 30 years now, as well as abundant resources onshore, Mexico has become one of the biggest producers of hydrocarbons (oil and gas) in the world and, not just incidentally, sometimes the second, sometimes the third biggest oil exporter to the United States (the other biggies are Saudi Arabia, Canada, and Venezuela).

The trouble is, production from Cantarell has peaked, and begun to drop. How bad is it? From a high of three million barrels of oil a day just a couple of years ago, two-thirds of which came from Cantarell, Mexico’s total production has declined to just two-and-a-half million barrels per day. In terms of percentages, that’s huge, and in terms of money, it’s even bigger, because depending on the price of oil, the proceeds from Pemex have accounted for as much as almost 40% of the national budget. Or put another way, five consecutive Mexican presidents have been spending the money. They credit oil for improvements to the nation’s infrastructures of transportation, education, and health. And that’s accurate; although it’s fair to say that they have had a risky undiversified business plan, the fact is that their country is stronger because of the oil. Mind you, it’s also fair to say (although some Mexican officials won’t openly say it) that their war on drugs today is consuming more than they can afford. Anyway, they need the money, which means that as Cantarell’s oil flow slows down, they’ve got to replace it. Somehow.

And that takes us to the deep water. In the petroleum industry, Cantarell isn’t “deep;” to the contrary, it’s called “shallow,” which means the sea floor where the rigs are operating is no more than 500 meters down from the water’s surface; roughly converted, that’s a little over 1,600 feet, or almost a third of a mile. Which any offshore oil company knows how to work in. That’s why they’ve called the oil they’ve been getting out of Cantarell — the second biggest “shallow” field in the world — the “easy oil.” That was then, this is now: though it’s an exaggeration because things aren’t black and white, they now generally say the “easy oil” is gone. But they do have something to replace it, because in other Mexican waters in the southern part of the Gulf, north of the coastal city of Veracruz, there are strong seismic indications of more oil than Cantarell ever produced; the estimates run as high as 29 billion barrels (for comparison’s sake, altogether in its 70-plus years of operation, Pemex has produced about 50 million barrels).

The rub? Pemex has never drilled in deep water (which is defined between 500 and 1,500 meters), let alone “ultra-deep” which is beyond 1,500 meters. Yet already, in what some consider an irresponsible headlong rush to replace the revenue from Cantarell, they’ve started doing just that. In the ultra-deep. As one leading Mexican analyst told me in an interview — she’s the head of an energy institute at Mexico’s closest thing to Harvard — Pemex wants to fly to Mars, even though it hasn’t even reached the moon. Which is the real heart of our story and the question we address: are we headed for another environmentally and costly disaster like BP’s Deepwater Horizon?

I can give you the declarative answer even before I deliver the debate: maybe, maybe not. The critics’ thinking is, if things could get out of hand in deep water for a company as experienced there as BP and as closely regulated (or, as we have learned in retrospect, sort of closely regulated) as the United States requires, then how can we hope that with no experience in the deep water and thus far no enforceable government regulations to guide it, Pemex will show all the necessary caution to minimize the possibility of another spill on the scale of BP’s? We can’t.

Why not? First, because Pemex is a state-owned monopoly which operates, according to one critic I talked to, with a military-style “We will damned well do what we want” culture. Second, because although Pemex has been producing oil for the nation for more than 70 years, there never has been and to this day still isn’t a government regulator with enforceable powers. Just two years ago, as Pemex was setting its sights on the deep water, a commission was appointed by the Minister of Energy (answerable, of course, to the President); it’s called the National Hydrocarbons Commission, intended for the first time to be a watchdog over Pemex. And it is working to create a set of regs that Pemex should follow. But I say “should,” because the word isn’t “must,” at least not yet. The commission has a total staff of about 50 people, which is no match for the 160,000 who work for Pemex, and when it was created, it was given only the power of persuasion; not the power of the law. I interviewed one member of the commission and he had to concede that it has no teeth; what he’s counting on is public opinion to force Pemex to abide by the commission’s recommendations if it doesn’t voluntarily do so. Good luck.

And if it doesn’t cooperate, what could happen? Well, the company might suffer a BP-scale spill, but have no workable plan to contain it. After all, despite the strong concern and heavy publicity and sheer resources earlier this year of both the U.S. government and private industry, Deepwater Horizon lived up to its name and gushed for a hundred days. In the event of a leak in a shallow water rig, divers can go down and at least try to plug it up. In the event of a deep or ultra-deep leak, as you might remember from the BP fiasco, they can’t do that; they have to rely on repairs by remote control, and I’m sure you remember how badly that went.

And that leads me to the third reason why people have cause to be afraid. Oil drilling can be a dirty business, and dangerous. However, although cost-cutting and carelessness seem to be behind the Deepwater Horizon disaster, they aren’t necessarily at the root of every catastrophe involving flammable fuels, which means that even with the best regulations and the best technology, accidents happen. Just a couple of days ago, a Pemex pipeline exploded in the Mexican state of Puebla. 28 people died, half of them children. At first glance, it wasn’t Pemex’s fault; it seems people were tapping into the pipeline and diverting the flow. A single spark— maybe just a cigarette— probably ignited the blast.

The relevance of that fatal explosion is, when something like that happens on land, you’ve got fire trucks and other emergency responders who try to keep things from getting any worse. In the water, you just don’t know what kind of response can be launched. If the National Hydrocarbons Commission, for example, says that Pemex needs a fleet of a hundred boats and a dozen helicopters prepared 24/7 to respond to a deep water leak, there’s nothing to force Pemex to spend the money. Nothing, that is, except its own good intentions.

It is fair to say, though, that the company is not run by a bunch of cowboys; not only have they been at it and quite good at it for many decades, but they are educated Mexicans who I’ve come to believe care as much about their own environment as we Americans care about ours. Until Deepwater Horizon, the biggest spill ever to foul the Gulf was theirs, back in the late 1970s at a well called Ixtoc. They’ve been there, done that, and don’t want to do it again. But if there’s a tug-of-war between the regulators and the accountants, who knows who will win?! The good news is, Deepwater Horizon made everyone in the industry aware of just how big a risk they’re taking; a recent estimate put the total cost to BP and its partners at something on the order of $40 billion. Neither Pemex nor anyone else wants to foot that kind of bill again. Having a safe, proper, reliable plan in place is the best insurance against it.

But so far, they don’t seem to. We spent two days being taken out to both the shallow water and the ultra-deep…. two days and a lot of air hours, from Mexico City to Ciudad del Carmen, then five helicopter hops around Cantarell, then back to Mexico City to turn around and fly to Veracruz and more hops by helicopter before rebasing Mexico City a second time. I asked the Pemex foreman on the very biggest rig they’ve got, the one that has started drilling in the ultra-deep waters of the Gulf, what kind of response plan is in place in case there’s a serious disaster. He told me they have “contingency plans;” but aside from vaguely referring to choppers and boats and a hotline telephone from rig to shore, he wasn’t more specific. Being accountable only to the government as opposed to the way a public company is accountable to stockholders, Pemex doesn’t have to say much about what it’s doing, and usually doesn’t.

However, thanks to a full court press by an aggressive freelance journalist we hired before we traveled Mexico City, we did get a rare interview with the number two man at this multi-billion-dollar company, the head of exploration and production, a man named Carlos Morales. We talked for more than half an hour and I won’t burden you with much from the interview, but I think one thing he told me pretty well summarizes his attitude toward drilling in the deep water. He said, “We still have a lot of work to do, we still have to learn a lot, we still have to understand many things, but I can guarantee you that with the things we do, we don’t run any unnecessary risks. And we have the latest technology, we have the skilled people, we have the procedures that hold today.”

Having flown out to see their newest deep water rig, I have to say, I think he’s telling the truth. No outsiders had ever been there before, and I had been warned that we had no chance of becoming the first, so with nothing to lose I went for broke and toward the end of the interview asked Morales on-camera if we could go out to verify the claims he had just made. I felt it might make it hard for him to say no, and to my surprise and my delight, he said yes. We couldn’t do it the very next day because we already were due to fly out to Cantarell, but we could do it the day after that. I didn’t quite know how lucky we were until we went to party a few nights later in Mexico City with our fixer, the freelance journalist. Almost everyone there was an American journalist who covers Latin America— The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press— and some jaws dropped when they learned who we’d talked with and where we’d been.

From the outset, it was a jaw-dropping trip. We were in a chopper out of Veracruz, flying over empty water for about 60 miles— no rigs, no ships, nothing to see but the glare and the smog over the Gulf— when suddenly like an apparition, we first spotted dead ahead just a vague shape, then the massive form of our target. So let me tell you something about these rigs, both the ones in the shallow waters of Cantarell and the one off Veracruz.

The shallow rigs are amazing enough; the one in the ultra-deep water is even more amazing. Flying out to Cantarell, within about ten minutes you begin seeing spots in the water, which grow into installations, which grow into rigs. You can see up to a dozen or so in a single sweep of the eyes. Many will actually be a collection of four, five, even six platforms connected by steel bridges; some are aligned in a straight line, some spike out of a hub like the points of a star. Many have humongous vertical flames flaring from the tops of pipe-towers protruding from their edges. What they’re doing is burning unwanted buildups of toxic or combustible gases, and sending a fair amount of black smoke into the sky. One of the raps against Pemex, by the way, is that the presence of so much burning gas proves that the company is not sufficiently efficient to make better use of the gas and therefore not efficient enough to drill in the risky territory of deep water, and that the company’s protestations of concern for the environment are bogus.

For our visits to every rig, we wore “Nomex” jumpsuits, which are flame-retardant; they’re the same kind of protective gear I’ve worn in forest fires. Under the suits, as we’d been told before we left, we could wear nothing but cotton. Anything else in a fire, any synthetic (which might in fact be oil-based), would stick to your skin and aggravate the burns. We also couldn’t have cell phones; their radio-frequency transmissions could kick off systems that might actually shut down a whole rig. We sure didn’t want to do that! And needless to say, on every rig there are strict rules prohibiting any kind of smoking, and with the risk of mortal danger so high and the need for every resident worker to be always alert, prohibitions against any kind of alcohol.

In Cantarell we landed on the helipads of three different rigs, plus a stationary ship that Pemex is very proud of; it’s nearly 350 meters long, which is almost the length of four football fields, and it processes so much crude oil that weather permitting, each day, through a flexible tube, it loads an entire supertanker which then heads off toward a distant port, mainly ports in the United States. There was one slightly strange thing associated with our time on the ship. A landing hadn’t been scheduled; we were only approved for a “flyover” to give us the chance to circle and videotape the ship in both a close and a far circumference. But after doing that, to our surprise we did land, and within a minute of clearing the blades of the helicopter we were ushered down to the greeting room closest to the landing pad. And there, we were given a half-hour safety briefing. This isn’t unusual; it happens on every rig, and it took at least a half hour at each stop, sometimes longer. They not only repeat the prohibitions about things like cigarettes and liquor, but they explain about lifeboats and muster stations and generally the safety protocol of the place.

And, they demonstrate how to put on a gas mask, which leads me to what happened to our team from our program World Report. There are four of us here from Denver, and I’m the only one who came clean-shaven. The other three guys all had facial hair, meaning, moustache and goatee. But note my use of the past tense “had;” they were required to shave it all off, because if you have to put on a respirator, you need a tight seal, which facial hair would prevent. One of the members of the team had had his beard for 17 years. So long, that we even expected tan lines! Now, mission accomplished, he starts the beard growing again from— excuse the pun— scratch.

Anyway, here’s the strange thing about our safety briefing on the ship. We landed, we sat for the briefing, then we climbed back up to the helipad on the stern and lifted off and left! All I can figure is, you cannot be on the ship (or a rig) without them hammering home what you need to know about surviving a gas leak or an explosion; it’s just not allowed. So the Catch 22 is, if we were going to land at all, we were going to have to hear the whole thing. Yet by the time it was over, it was time to leave because we already were behind the clock. We weren’t quite sure why under those circumstances they put us on the ship in the first place, but believe me, that’s not the only question with which I left.

On the shallow water rigs, most of the people working there do 14 days on, then 14 off. It’s a very confining environment; part of every rig is a “habitat” where they have rooms and a mess hall and maybe a video theater and a gym and a few other facilities for their off-time. But basically, they wake up, then shower and dress and eat, then work for 12 hours, then eat again and hit the sack before doing it all over again. One of the rigs on which we spent time has 220 people living there, which actually means more like 440 staff the rig week in and week out. It gives you some idea what the oil and gas are worth. 71 different undersea wells feed this one rig (which separates oil from gas). The control rooms are pretty high tech, with computers and controls to constantly monitor temperatures and pressures and water salinities and other factors that could turn into trouble if they go too far off safe parameters. Not to mention the multiple infamous “blowout preventers” about which we all read in connection with Deepwater Horizon. But again, if despite their precautions, something goes terribly wrong, some sort of breakage in the shallow water is considered relatively easy to contain.

Not so for the deep water. Simply because it’s so far down and so dark and the pressures are so high, the wells in deep and ultra-deep water are inherently more dangerous. And harder to fix. In Pemex’s defense though, I came away from our visit to the new rig that they just got in position in the ultra-deep water pretty impressed that all possible precautions are exercised.

The rig is called Centenário, which means centenary, which stands for the century of Mexican independence. They call it a “sixth generation” rig, because since the beginning of drilling for oil in ocean waters, there have been six generations of new technology, each replacing the old. And Centenário does have the very latest. It is a “semi-submersible,” which means the whole 30,000 ton platform is actually floating in the water— four bulbous legs are filled with ballast and are submerged about as deep as a five-story building— and more important, there’s state-of-the-art computer technology to execute eight thrusters that despite wild winds and strong seas, keep Centenário precisely where GPS and other technology says it’s supposed to be. Which means, directly over the hole it’s drilling. The tubes they push through the water and sink through rock beneath the floor of the sea are designed with enough tolerance to bend up to 80 meters. But the day we were there, this 60-million-pound platform, measuring almost 400 feet from the surface of the water to the top of the drill derrick, was only off by an almost incomprehensible 10 centimeters. Think, four inches. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes on the computers in the bridge of the rig.

And everything— at least every critical system for both monitoring and responding to a problem— has not just redundancy, but double redundancy. Between the thrusters to maintain position and these redundant systems, it makes me think of the space shuttle. Although the funny thing was, while I was in the central command, called “the doghouse,” for about five minutes, I asked the man in charge, called “the driller,” about the highest of all the high tech devices on the rig, he hit a button and suddenly on every huge glass panel overlooking the main drill, windshield wipers started sweeping back and forth. He laughed and said there were better things than these, but still, it really was pretty cool.

Work on an oil rig is dangerous work. Not just from the chance that there’ll be an explosion and you might die, but from the hands-on work itself. You’ve probably seen movies with “roughnecks,” who are sticking their hands into heavy steel machinery that is spinning and rising and falling all at the same time. Injuries, sometimes serious injuries on rigs like those, are common. But not on this newest generation of rig. It’s all computerized, so that the driller, in his “doghouse,” controls almost all the movement of pipes and drills and bits by remote control; his station looks like something out of Star Trek. And that goes for the blowout preventers too. There’s a driller on duty in the doghouse 24-hours a day. The moment anything spells trouble, he can have his finger on the button to activate the preventers within mere seconds. A guarantee? No. Comforting? I’d say so.

Security is another concern. When you think about it, Pemex today has to look out for foreign terrorists, for pirates, for drug cartels. Any of them might cause chaos. And the cartels might be the biggest threat; they already have attacked land-based pipelines and kidnapped some Pemex executives. Every rig has a 500-meter-radius buffer zone, which means nobody is authorized to come any closer. I asked how they’re protected from a serious challenge, but understandably, beyond talking about “contingencies,” they didn’t spell anything out. Hopefully they weren’t evasive because their contingencies are thin. So far, out on Centenário, they’ve only been challenged once— by Greenpeace, as the company’s director of communications told me with a wry smile. It was peacefully resolved.

Another fear of the critics is that since Pemex has no previous deep water experience, the people working the rigs will neither understand the technology nor know how to respond to a catastrophe. But my admittedly brief experience on Centenário says, that’s not an issue. Both the captain of the ship-side of the platform, and the superintendent of the drilling side, are from the Netherlands, each with more than a decade on the deep water. The “driller” I met in the doghouse is from the U.K. with a similar volume of experience. I went into the engine room, which is impressive: eight massive Caterpillar engines, with more than four megawatts of power, enough to light up a medium-sized city. The two men in charge? Both from Canada, their lives spent on the deep water. The point is, international standards call for any key position to be filled by someone with at least five years experience drilling in the deep. Pemex seems to be living up to that.

The rig itself was built in Singapore, then sailed like a ship for three months across two oceans to its position in the Mexican waters of the Gulf. It now sits a little more than 1,900 meters above the ocean floor (that’s well over a mile already) and just since September when it started digging its hole, the drill is down half-a-mile further into the rock. The target, which seismic readings suggest is rich with hydrocarbons, is a full two-and-a-half miles beneath the surface. I’m no geologist, and don’t even play one on TV, but those hydrocarbons— the oil and gas underfoot— aren’t in big open subterranean aquifers; they are trapped in hard porous rock; to get to it and through it, one of the drill bits they use is about 9-inches in diameter with diamond tips. I got to pick up one core sample of the rock, only about a foot long and maybe five inches across. It probably weighed about 20 pounds. Visually, it’s almost like an abstract black-and-gray barber pole, with irregular dark seams and sometimes larger dark splotches running through it. That’s the hydrocarbon that has to be brought to the surface. How anyone ever figured out what’s down there, let alone how to get to it in the first place, I don’t know! Except, I do now know the story of Rudecindo Cantarell. As do you.

The historic importance of oil to Mexico is demonstrated at the base of the Pemex headquarters tower in Mexico City. I’ve seen Paris, Athens, Rome, probably the three cities in which you’d expect to find the world’s most colossal sculptures of everyone from warriors to philosophers to lovers. But I’ve never seen one nearly as big as the bust— we’re talkin’ just head and shoulders and I’ll bet it’s 15 to 20 feet high— of President Lázaro Cardenas. He’s idolized in this country, because he’s the one who in 1938 nationalized the foreign oil companies then operating in Mexico— mainly British and American. And that’s why to this day, for better or worse, Pemex operates alone.

The government actually tried to mollify the company’s critics (and attract investors to lighten the load) just a couple of years ago by floating a proposal to actually change the nation’s constitution. Since the days of Cardenas, the constitution has prohibited Pemex from partnering with any foreign companies. But the proposal was rejected. It’s probably too bad, because if the companies that have been at it for many years could partner with Pemex, people probably would be reassured and possibly, in the final analysis, safer. But oil isn’t just a commodity to Mexicans; they call it their nation’s treasure. So, while Pemex can hire experienced foreigners to oversee things, and recently won the right to offer incentive contracts to foreign oil companies, it can’t give them a stake, which diminishes their involvement because they’re not in business to make a dollar-per-barrel profit; they’re in business to have the oil so that when the price goes up, so do their profits.

Just one more thing about Pemex, and it’s a weird one. In other oil-producing countries I’ve been in, from Saudi Arabia to Venezuela, the price of gasoline is heavily subsidized for the people living there. Some of you who are reading this letter might remember my story in a letter earlier this year about a border town in Venezuela, where we followed smugglers who bought their gas for pennies in their own country, even filling additional tanks secreted under their vehicles, then crossed the border to sell it for a profit in Colombia. Well, Pemex doesn’t do any such favor for its citizens. To the contrary, when you convert liters to gallons, they pay more for gas here than we do in the United States. And that even includes California where prices are outrageous!

Speaking of gas, if you’ve never been to Mexico City, you wouldn’t believe how much is wasted here. By sitting still. In traffic jams. Like some of you, I’ve seen epic traffic jams in other parts of the world, but Mexico City is like the mother of traffic jams. Leave for the airport at 4:30 (as we did this morning) and you’ll breeze your way there. But leave an hour later and you’re already in trouble. And we’re not just talking “rush hour;” once people are up and about, the congestion never clears. If you’re anything like me, you try to figure out what’s happening when you’re stuck in traffic. Whether I’m on my way home from work or from ski country, I want to understand the dynamics of a stoppage. An accident? Construction? A tunnel (which somehow creates congestion even though there are just as many lanes going through the tunnel as there are going in! What’s up with that?)?

Mexico City.

One day we went to the top of Mexico City’s third tallest building. We wanted to get some “high shots” of this massive city (estimated population: close to 30 million). Well, we didn’t get what we wanted because we needed a permit that we didn’t have. But it gave me a chance to study the traffic from on high, the 44th floor. Literally as far as my eye could see— and that limit really was reached because of smog, not vision— a four-lane one-way street heading toward the skyscraper was packed with cars, all of them sitting stone still. I had to be seeing at least a two mile stretch. There was no accident, no construction, no tunnel. Just cars. Too many cars. When a light changes from red to green, the block of cars at the starting line begins to move, but because it takes a few seconds for each layer of drivers to react, no more than five or six lines get through before the light goes red again. And there, my friends, you have the best analysis of traffic jams that money can’t buy.

Our worst traffic experience — and there were a bunch — was trying to get to the site of a second little story we were shooting in Mexico City because we were there; call it two for the price of one. I’m not even reporting the story; I just went along with the producer and crew because it sounded interesting, and it was. In fact it was fascinating. The story— which will be entirely told with the voices of the people involved— is about a retirement home for prostitutes. It was founded a few years ago by a Mexico City mayor and an advocate who had been a prostitute herself. It is in one of the poorest and most congested parts of the congested city, the central market for cheap toys and cheap food and cheap makeup and cheap clothes, many of which I suspect fell conveniently off the back of a truck. You just look at some of the people brushing by your car while you stand locked in traffic for a minute at a time and you know, lock your doors.

The women — the prostitutes — have to be at least 60 just to get in. And destitute. It’s not surprising when you think about it; although a few have relatives who still stay in touch, many have no one to care for them, no one to utter a nice word to them, no one to love them. They are society’s castoffs. There are 25 broken-down women living there and I asked the director of the residence whether there’s a single one who hasn’t been raped and beaten on a regular basis. Her answer was, no.

The story of just one woman apparently is typical. Her name is Sonya. She got pregnant and had a child at 13. Then a year later, age 14, when she refused to dance with a man, he pulled a gun and shot her in the head. To this day, the bullet is still embedded. It partially paralyzed her, which made her unfit in those days for other kinds of work, so since she ended up with three children to support, she turned to sex. And has sold her body for the 46 years since then. She accepts her life, accepts her fate. What’s more, she still looks for her kind of work. As you might imagine, this is not a part of town where you find sequined whores the likes of Eliot Spitzer’s girlfriend. But still needing money, Sonya charges 50 pesos, about five bucks, just to show up — kind of like the minimum price of a service visit when you call the plumber — then another 50 pesos for the act itself.

For the hour or two that we were there, various other residents drifted in and out of the courtyard where we were working. None is pretty, none is curvaceous, none is stylish. They all seem pretty much used up. Yet there is still a spectrum in how they look. On one end, there was a woman with fingernails painted purple and lips painted red and eyebrows painted amber. Yes, amber. She is heavy and wrinkled, but still doing her best to look nice. On the other end, another woman has a face that reflects the beatings she endured. She is only 60— a newcomer— but permanently hunched over. There’s not a tooth left in her mouth.

Since they live a very idle and monotonous life now, sitting around much of the day in this damp place in dirty white molded plastic chairs— except for the ones like Sonya who sometimes still go looking for clients— I tried peripherally to watch the ones just sitting and passing the time to gauge their interest, their curiosity, in what we were doing. This is not a place that sees a television camera every day of the week. But I got nothing. Until we were leaving. At that point— with the crew already outside shooting the teeming market just beyond their safe door— one of the women got up and said to me in Spanish, “We are glad you came. You are welcome here any time.” Then she leaned across to me and gave me a hug. Believe me, I had mixed feelings about returning it, but after her was another, then another after that. They all wished me well, and I returned the flattery. I thought about it afterward and certainly don’t know, but maybe they warmed to me because I was a man who came and went quickly through their lives without knocking their teeth out.

Up on one wall of the refuge is a poster. It says, “Ni Santas, Ni Puntas, Solo Mujures.” What that means is, neither saints, nor whores, only women. Right before leaving, I made a donation on the behalf of our team, a thousand pesos which is roughly a hundred dollars. The director— an attractive psychotherapist in her forties— told me how grateful she was; they operate as you might imagine on a very thin shoestring, and this money would buy them Christmas dinner. Feliz Navidad.

One more thing. Driving away from the retirement residence, we crawled at snail’s pace down a street on which young prostitutes were looking for work. Dozens of them in low blouses, short dresses, high heels. Very high heels. I couldn’t help but wonder, will these girls who feel pretty and maybe even wanted end up where we’d just been? Some probably will. If we’re lucky, we all turn old (just ask me!). The question is, will we have a decent place to be when we get there?

I often say I’ve got the best job on earth. Maybe you disagree, because reading about me spending my time with risky oil rigs and neglected prostitutes may not make it sound so hot. But look at the range of what I got to see and do just this one week. I was out on a high-tech oil platform in the middle of nowhere that can stay within ten centimeters of its ideal target…. and in a casa for washed-up puntas where dirty clothes are still washed in a sink. I’ve been with people whose energy and expertise generates billions of dollars for their country… and with others who sell their bodies for about ten bucks. I wouldn’t trade a moment.

Greg

October 2009, from somewhere over Europe…. sometimes perhaps on it…. and in all likelihood for the last part of the letter, high above the Atlantic, heading home …

Dear Family and Friends,

I am starting this letter on a flight from Amsterdam to London. But it’s a short distance and thus a short flight, and since I have a few more planes and trains ahead of me before heading home, I’ll write this as I go along and don’t really know where the final words will be composed.

With a team from HDNet, we’re here in Europe shooting two programs: the first is on the Dutch healthcare system, which is probably about the closest thing to where the United States probably is going in the controversial process of reforming American healthcare. The second is on the issue of assisted suicide. That part of the trip is motivated by a constitutional challenge from assisted suicide advocates in the state of Montana (with another possibly pending in Connecticut), and is taking us to the United Kingdom, which has had contentious battles about the prosecution of those who help their loved ones to commit suicide, and Switzerland, which has the world’s most liberalized laws. We’ll go to Montana for that part of the story once we get home again….and I learn to ride a horse.

It’s a good trip. Not just because both are meaty stories to which we can do justice in the documentary-style format of our “World Report” program on HDNet, but because….well, look at my agenda: the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. I mean, what’s wrong with that?!? Each is a nation with good food, unique and interesting culture, and wide command of English (although, in the spirit of My Fair Lady, one does run into Brits who require a bit of translation). Since most of my trips abroad take me to places that haven’t quite caught up to our comfortably civilized ways at home, a trip like this is a treat. By way of contrast, a few years ago a man in Peru, who decades earlier had spent a year in the United States, told us that the most important thing he learned from his time in America was the definition of a civilized country: it is a place, he said, where when you go to a restroom, you don’t have to carry in your own toilet paper. Let’s just say, throughout each of these European nations, you don’t have to carry in your own toilet paper!

Before I tell you about our stories, I’ve got to tell you about survival in the Netherlands, or for you old-timers who just can’t let go, Holland. As some of you know, I love riding bikes. At home I have a mountain bike on which I’ve crawled up and barreled down steep trails in Colorado and climbed and descended in total terror (don’t tell the guys I go with) along sheer limestone cliffs in the mountain-biking capital of Moab, Utah. And, I have a road bike, on which I’ve climbed 12,000-foot mountain passes with no shoulder between the road and the drop-off, and ridden several times in century events— most recently just the middle of last month amongst the trucks and busses of a sea-level city named New York. But none of those experiences comes closest to being my most dangerous encounter with a bike; that came in the Netherlands, this week…. every time I tried to cross the street!

Holland, you see, is a nation of bikes. Not because it has the right weather for biking— every day we were there it was cold and grey and damp. But because it is flat. I mean… FLAT. It’s almost as if the landscape lies flat on its back; bridges are the only hills (“Netherlands” in fact means “low lands.” Because they are). That doesn’t make for the most interesting biking in the world, because while sometimes it’s nice to ride from here to there without a mountain pass in your way, after a while you can get bored with the monotony of the horizon from flat roads and the unchanging pace on the pedals. But it does make for relatively easy biking. Or at least it would, if people had relatively easy bikes. The Dutch don’t. Most have relics that look like they’re made of iron; I picked one up and it felt heavier than my two bikes combined with Carol’s thrown in too. That’s because they’re not climbing, they’re just riding. So they have these simple upright bikes built of iron with generator lights and spring seats and baskets in front to carry their groceries and sometimes their kids, even their dogs.

That’s all just fine. The trouble is, bicyclists have godlike status; bikes are kings and they rule the roads. If you like to ride like I do, you might not think that sounds so bad. But I wasn’t a bicyclist there; I was a pedestrian. And bikes in the Netherlands trump everything else: trams, cars, pedestrians. They don’t just have bike lanes like ours, where a broken white line punctuated by a stenciled bicyclist defines the corridor. No, they have their own passageways, usually separated by narrow elevated islands from the cars on one side and the sidewalks on another. But these passageways for bikes look just like the sidewalks. Every time you come out of a building, or cross the street from one corner to another, first you alight from the sidewalk by crossing the island to the bike lane, then from the bike lane across another island to the street, then back across the other bike lane and finally to the sidewalk on the opposite side.

And the bikes don’t stop for anybody. Which means that drivers in their cars, hoping to turn right, have to look sharply over their shoulders to ensure that a bike heading in the same direction isn’t barreling straight along in the bike lane. And that pedestrians like me have to look both ways (bikes are going both ways in most lanes) before stepping into and across a bike lane at our peril. The experience reminded me of a man Carol and I knew from New York. He went to London on business twice every year for decades. Yet after all those visits, one day he forgot himself and looked left instead of right when he stepped off a curb and got killed by a bus. My guess is, had he gone instead to Amsterdam on a regular basis rather than London, he wouldn’t have survived even as long as he did.

Maybe that’s a good segue to the new healthcare system in the Netherlands, which is less than three years old. I don’t even know if it covers foreigners who get sick or hurt (by bikes, for instance) while visiting— I didn’t think of that question in all the interviews I did and only came up with it while writing this sentence (the story of my life and probably true for many journalists; it happens to me a lot. Kind of like having an argument but only thinking of your best retorts right after you walk away!). I do remember that when we lived in London (okay, so I’m not quite ready to begin my description of Dutch healthcare), a friend visiting from the States hurt her leg and we had to take her to the hospital where, because of the National Health system there, she got full treatment without paying a penny. You can argue of course that the taxpayers had to pay and you’d be right but still, it demonstrates the simplicity of getting healthcare.

Britain is what’s called a “single payer” system where the entirety of publicly-financed healthcare is available to everyone in the country. It’s the “safety net” concept and it’s far far far from perfect, mainly because it always depends on a piece of the pie in the national budget. When money is tight, so too, probably, is the quality of healthcare. However, we had the option while living there of paying extra, or of applying our employer-purchased or personally-purchased insurance to private healthcare, and we did. But we also used the National Health from time to time— for example, when Jason was born, we did it with a private doctor in a private hospital (the same one in which Princess Diana bore her sons). But pre-natal and post-natal care (including home visits, believe it or not) was provided by the state in the interest of nipping problems in the bud. For something like the first year, we even got a bi-monthly check (or “cheque” as they say there) meant to be used for milk. The funny part is, it was always addressed only to Carol, in keeping with the British conviction that if the father got his hands on the milk money, he’d drink it down at the pub. T’was, for me, a very dry period in my life.

But back to Holland. No matter whether foreigners are covered there, our program is about healthcare for the Dutch themselves, and how it works. The answer is, not perfectly (even its most ardent advocates call it a work in progress), but from almost everyone’s point of view, it works pretty darned well. Why? A few reasons: 1) It is universal, meaning, everyone has it. 2) The insurance companies are private. When it comes to the controversial concept in the American debate about a “government option,” government in the Netherlands isn’t involved in the insurance business. 3) When you apply for insurance, the company to which you apply cannot turn you down. Pre-existing conditions? No worries, come on down! 4) When the companies take on a high-risk patient, the government subsidizes them for doing so from something called the Risk Equalization Fund. 5) All kids to the age of 18 have coverage paid not by the families but by the government, from employer contributions not unlike ours. 6) Coverage puts a heavy emphasis on preventive healthcare, so when an illness is just starting, the insurers spend a little at an early stage instead of a lot later on.

Now, here’s the part that some will find most objectionable but I’m not sure how to avoid it if universal coverage is the goal: 7) The government sets the rules, which really means it issues the mandates for what you might call the “minimal” insurance policy to which everyone is entitled for a minimum monthly premium (which still covers an awful lot). But here’s the counterbalance to that). The insurance companies, which have to offer that minimal policy for a mandated price, also offer supplemental policies with whatever additional benefits they want to offer at whatever prices they think they can get. If I’m a consumer, I can shop around for these supplemental benefits and let the companies compete for my business, and if an insurance company doesn’t like me (because, say, the insurer sees risk, which in my case makes him a pretty smart fellow!), it can turn me down. An example: we had a “fixer” in the Netherlands, a freelance journalist we hired to help us arrange our interviews and just get around. She told me her family has supplemental insurance and I asked how she chose which company’s policy to buy. Her answer was, she has two young teenagers and one company offered particularly comprehensive orthodontic care, so that’s the one she picked. Finally: 9) The Dutch pay roughly half of what we Americans (those of us with health insurance at all) pay.

That might lead you to ask, how do they do it? Believe me, we didn’t hear any horror stories about long waits for elective surgery or horrible experiences with the quality of healthcare, the kinds of things many Americans fear if we go to a system in our country that mirrors, say, Canada (with the government acting as sole insurer) or Britain (all depending on a piece of the pie in the national budget). Government’s function in the Netherlands is twofold: collecting the funds for subsidies, and setting the rules for minimal coverage.

Otherwise, it’s the private insurance companies that ensure the quality of care, because with the need to compete directly for the business of every citizen, they are motivated to try to offer better supplemental policies than their competitors, at better prices. The way they can best do that is by negotiating for the best deals with the providers: doctors, hospitals, and so forth. Truth be known, there is some fear that the system will drive prices down to the point where the only way for medical providers to survive is to diminish the quality of the service; reducing staffing, for example, in hospitals. But so far, it seems to be more a fear than a reality, and when I interviewed the Minister of Health, he told me that’s one of the things in this “work in progress” that they’re trying to prevent.

Since I still want to tell you about our “assisted suicide” story, which at this point in the occasional composition of this letter we’ve already started shooting— I’m typing this part right now on a train north from London to Leeds— I’ll finish with an anecdote about the Dutch healthcare system. The law requires that every insurance company accepts all comers, and that every citizen applies. But in keeping with human nature, about one percent of the people don’t. Maybe it’s because they prefer to take their chances…and maybe it’s just because they prefer to spend their money on Heineken. Well, if they get caught, which sometimes happens when suddenly they need costly medical care and think they can get away with applying for insurance for the first time, they have to pay not only the sum total of the premiums they’ve skipped, but a 30% penalty on top of that.

It sounded a bit steep to me, so I asked the health minister how they could justify that. His answer was logical— maybe not acceptable to every political persuasion, but logical. For one thing, part of the rationale for universal coverage in the first place is that when someone without insurance needs medical attention, those who have it end up paying (shades of the U.S.). For another, the whole concept of insurance— especially when it’s provided solely by private companies— is that you pay for a long time but might or might not ever take advantage of your coverage; that is part of the way insurance companies make their money. Therefore, the people who have dodged the mandate in the Netherlands to buy insurance have, in effect, cheated the insurance companies of the easy profit they would have made while these people were healthy.

The U.S. surely won’t end up with a system just like the Dutch, but if we do come up with any change at all, we probably shall pull more elements from their system than from any other.

We also could do worse than to pull one of their culinary traditions into our own: “rijstofel” (RYE-shtah-full). Actually it’s from Indonesia, where the Dutch were the colonial power for a century-and-a-half… although when I was in Indonesia in January, I never ate anything that came close to what I ate in Amsterdam. I knew to look for it because thirty years ago, when we went with some visiting friends to Holland, we had a rijstofel I never forgot, but never have been able to duplicate. It’s kind of a smorgasbord of tastes and ingredients, with fish and lamb and pork and poultry and beef. Lots of sauces, lots of rice, one of those meals like a shared Chinese feast where every bite is better than the last one. We had it twice. (I might as well tell you the name of the place, for those who might some day visit Amsterdam. It is “Kantjil” at Spuistraat 291. Phone 020 620 0994. (www.kantjil.nl)

Okay, time (in a manner of speaking) for “assisted suicide.” In the culture of media-driven labels and modern politics, advocates for liberalized laws on assisted suicide don’t actually call it assisted suicide; they call it “assisted dying.” But they’re one and the same thing. What you shouldn’t call it though is “euthanasia.” Why not? Because it’s not, and for those who don’t know (which included me until about two weeks ago when I started reading about it), that’s the first distinction to explain. Assisted suicide means, someone assists. In other words, if you’re the one who wants to kill yourself, I’m the one who gets you the poison, or hands you the plastic bag, or drives you to the bridge. On the other hand, euthanasia means the “assister” actually conducts the act. So again, if you’re the one who wants to die, I’m the one who puts the poison in your mouth, or puts the bag over your head, or pushes you off the bridge.

It may sound like an academic difference until you think about some of the people who want to commit suicide. Because of disease or paralysis, they are literally unable to do it by themselves; one of the most compelling books I’ve ever read is called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It is a true story about a guy in France— in fact it is by the guy— who had the worst kind of stroke and could not breath on his own, nor talk, nor touch, nor control a single movement from his temple to his toes. It was the classic case of a man who can think trapped inside a body that’s inert. The only thing over which he had any control was one eyelid, which he could blink voluntarily. With the patient help of friends who held a board with all the letters of the alphabet arranged in order of their frequency of use in French, that is how he laboriously dictated the book. Surely there are plenty of people on this planet with terrible disabilities who, like most of us, want to live every day they are granted and get unlimited joy out of life. If you’re reading this letter, you probably read my last one about the young motivational speaker born with no arms or legs. He exemplifies the ability to be positive despite disabilities.

But some aren’t so positive, and if you think ‘But for the grace of God go I,’ who can condemn them?! The problem for them is, they can’t necessarily put themselves out of their misery alone. They cannot take the poison without help…. or pull the bag over their heads or jump off the bridge. Back in my ABC days I did a story on what was then just a ballot initiative to legalize assisted suicide in Oregon, and I interviewed a man whose wife had been painfully and completely disabled and wanted to die. Ultimately, they tried all sorts of things to enable her to carry out the final act, to avoid having him prosecuted for murder. But she was physically unable to do it. So ultimately, he carried out what I’d call a mercy killing. With his wife’s consent, he put a plastic bag over her head until she suffocated. Which I call an unnecessarily tragic way to die. But which prosecutors call murder.

Just about everyplace where assisted suicide is legal— which includes the two American states of Oregon and Washington where voters have approved it— euthanasia is not. But here’s another concept worth contemplating, and in a way it’s at the heart of the advocates’ arguments: suicide most places these days is not illegal, yet helping someone carry it out is.

There are several reasons why, and while personally I support the idea of assisted suicide, I think the reasons are rational. For one thing, there has to be some sort of control over the means of the assisted death. Thankfully, few of us are experts in the act of killing, and we might end up either helping in a way that prolongs the person’s pain in the process, or botching it and simply leaving the suicidal individual alive but in even worse shape than before. For another thing, there has to be a way— at least a law— to prevent anyone from assisting in someone else’s suicide for his or her own personal gain. Certainly in cases where, say, one spouse helps another, there is personal gain— the inheritance of money, the sole assumption of home ownership— but the important thing prosecutors have to ask is, was that the motive for helping with the death, or was the assister compelled by compassion?

We went to Great Britain to ask about those issues. Britain has had laws against assisted suicide for almost fifty years. But when prosecutors have investigated cases after the fact, they often have compassionately excused people who could show that they were only helping relieve some kind of unbearable suffering. However, it has always been on a case-by-case basis, with no guarantee that next time, a husband who helps his wife take her life won’t be nailed for some form of murder.

Enter 46-year-old Debbie Purdy. She is a vital, vibrant, vivacious woman in the Yorkshire city of Leeds who has had Multiple Sclerosis for more than a decade. There are cases of MS where it never takes a heavy toll, but also cases where those who suffer it slowly slide into permanent states of pain and total disability. Sadly, Debbie is on the latter course. Understanding what she does about MS, she knows that clinically the odds are high that her condition today, where she is stuck in a wheelchair and her skin burns and her eyesight is blurry, will worsen.

But that’s not all that scares her. She also knows that sometimes the MS weakens people’s musculature to the point where they cannot swallow, which not only means they can’t eat but they also can’t inhale and exhale on their own without gasping violently for every breath; they could suffocate without artificial assistance. Debbie Purdy doesn’t want it to go that far. Right now she is full of life and full of joy and spent the hours she dedicated to us in her Leeds home with sea-blue eyes bright with excitement and an infectious smile permanently flashing across her face. But while we did talk about things that make her happy, we mostly talked about her deterioration, and her death. When you are sitting almost knee-to-knee with someone who’s telling you that she probably will want to die before her time, with her husband helping her every step of the way, it’s chilling.

It’s chilling because it’s not just academic. As Debbie’s MS worsens, her joy will end. That’s when she wants to die. The problem is, if she can’t be positively sure that her husband won’t be prosecuted for helping her, she’ll take her life before she’s ready but while she can still do it by herself. That would cheat her of immeasurable time with a quality of life she still treasures. Yet as her MS spreads its impairment, the door to carry out her suicide alone is closing.

And that is why she went to court, eventually getting a decision last month by none less than the House of Lords— the ultimate authority on British law— that ordered the Director of Public Prosecutions (like the boss of district attorneys) to issue guidelines about who he’d prosecute for assisted suicide and who he wouldn’t. The guidelines weren’t a total victory for advocates in the United Kingdom— they want it legalized. But the chief prosecutor gave them a green light of sorts. He said that if someone helps someone else to die for compassionate reasons, and with the consent of the person committing suicide, and not for personal gain, it will be allowed.

But— and here’s the catch— it still will not be allowed on British soil. Just as there is only a small handful of states in the U.S. that allow assisted suicide, there is only a handful of western nations that allow it, and of them all, Switzerland has the least restrictive laws, which is why Switzerland is where we ended our trip. The most restrictive law everywhere else is that it pertains only to residents. But not in Switzerland. You can travel to Switzerland from wherever you live and legally have help when you kill yourself. What’s more, unlike Oregon and Washington and a couple of other countries, which require a doctors’ consensus that someone has a terminal condition, in Switzerland a suicide can be assisted simply (as if anything about it is simple) if someone is enduring “unbearable suffering.”

That can be a slippery slope. In my mind, Debbie Purdy with her degenerative disease qualifies, as does someone with a grave disease or an injury that promises a low quality of life, but where to draw the line? Someone who hates his disability— blindness maybe, or paralysis— but isn’t actually in decline, let alone pain? Someone with severe depression? Or mental illness? How about a businessman whose enterprise has gone bankrupt? Or a young woman who has broken up with her boyfriend? Or a teenager who got failing grades in school and fears his parents’ wrath? There are suicides every day under those conditions; should it be legal to help them carry it out?

In Switzerland, the only thing the law specifically proscribes is death for the purpose of personal gain. That’s why, every time there’s an assisted suicide in Switzerland, the prosecutor of the canton (the region) investigates. But I interviewed the prosecutor in the canton of Zurich and he said they’re really looking only at two things: motive, and method, which means ensuring that the suicide is only “assisted” and not an act of euthanasia.

If it was chilling talking with Debbie Purdy about planning her own death, it was equally chilling talking with the founders of the two organizations in Switzerland that help people like Debbie carry them out, especially when one of the interviews was in front of a bed in a room where three days earlier there had been a death and the day after, another was scheduled. One interview was in Lausanne, the French-speaking part of the country, and the other— the one in front of the bed— was near German-speaking Zurich. Both are older men (who am I to talk?) who are committed to what they consider the right to kill yourself when you’re ready.

One organization is called EXIT, the other DIGNITAS (which is Latin for dignity, since the whole concept is about death with dignity). Interestingly, Exit only helps Swiss people carry out their suicides. When I asked the French-speaking founder, himself an ENT doctor, why, he explained that there is more than enough demand in his own country and he simply doesn’t have the resources to help anyone from without its borders. Dignitas, on the other hand, only helps people from abroad.

But both organizations do what they do pretty much the same way. Someone applies, there are consultations (including conversations about whether there is some alternative to suicide), and eventually the “applicant’s” wish is provisionally granted. In the case of Exit, a team goes to the applicant’s home. The family is welcome to be there at the end. In the case of Dignitas, the applicants and whoever wants to be with them come to headquarters near Zurich.

A doctor’s consent is required, although not to affirm that someone is fit to die. The doctor is needed to prescribe the poison that will kill them. When the day comes, the suicidal patients first are given an anti-vomiting medication, then a lethal dose of the barbiturate Sodium Pentobarbital, which puts them into a deep coma and then brings their breathing to a halt. And they are gone. The head of Exit told me that when people object to what he does, he points out that by expediting a peaceful death, he is preventing a violent one. When you think about people who take up a gun or jump off a bridge or hang from a rope, his argument does not sound irrational.

The other argument against assisted suicide, of course, is a moral one. Generally it takes the shape of, “Who are you to play God?” The head of Dignitas (a human rights lawyer) had an answer for that, which wouldn’t end the argument but also, to me, makes sense. What he said was, he’s not killing anybody. He’s only helping them to kill themselves, and to do so of their own free will. In fact for the prosecutor’s sake he documents every suicide on video, and the very last question he asks someone, literally as the cup of poison is close to their lips (or, in some drastic cases, their gastric tubes), is, “You can still stop. Do you want to stop, or do you want to die?” Last year, 196 people said, “Die.”

I don’t have a moral objection to any of it. But I appreciate the genuine passion of those who do. I suppose the only thing to say is, if it’s not for you, don’t ever do it. Of course that’s not a ironclad argument, mainly because if you do object on moral grounds, you might believe that anyone who helps someone else die is actually committing murder. It falls into the category of debates about abortion and capital punishment and stem cell research….which means I can just leave it hanging out there because I’m surely not going to convince anyone with this letter.

That brings me, if you’ll excuse the grim pun, to the final chapter. In London, we interviewed a guy named Edward Turner. Which leads to another short digression. It was fun for me when we pulled up to Turner’s home on Fitzroy Square, just east of the West End, because back when I was based in London, and we had to do some kind of on-camera standup late in the evening with a London background, we went the half-dozen blocks from the ABC bureau to Fitzroy Square, because its buildings have elegant Edwardian facades, and at night are illuminated.

But it wasn’t much fun talking with Edward Turner. He is the treasurer of an organization in the UK that is pushing for laws permitting assisted suicide, and he comes to the issue with personal experience. Early in this decade, his father died of a degenerative neurological disease, and by the end, as Edward bluntly put it to me, although his lungs were still sucking in air, his father was no more than “a rotting stinking corpse.” He died in great pain and great indignity. So when his mother came down with a similar disease just a couple of years later, she said she didn’t want to die as her husband had. Edward promised her that she wouldn’t. When the time came, Edward and his siblings took their mother to Zurich, where she took her poison and forever fell asleep.

The Turner siblings weren’t arrested but they could have been. They had assisted their mother before ever leaving home by buying her plane ticket to Switzerland. Then they took her to the airport in London, pushed her wheelchair into the airplane, pushed it off in Zurich, and delivered her to the place of her death. The only thing they didn’t do was hold the cup from which she took her last drink. Earlier in this letter, when I used the phrase “but for the grace of God go I,” I didn’t mean it in a religious sense. What I meant was, this could be any of us. If I ever get to the point where life is only something to painfully and fearfully endure, I hope I’ll be able to end it on my terms. And if someone I love gets to that point and they want my help, I hope I’ll be able to help them. It is horrible to contemplate any of this, and hopefully only hypothetical, but without laws that enable us to make such choices, it may be even worse.

In my work, I have seen a lot of life but also a lot of death. I am lucky that it hasn’t laid me low with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, but it has affected me as it must. What it has left me believing is, death is not just the end of life, it is a part of life. Anyway, as Woody Allen once said, “No one gets out of this life alive.”

Greg's new book

On that cheery note, I wish everyone well because, while many people every day go through unpleasant stages of life, life in our world is good. As predicted, I am signing off somewhere over Greenland and will probably send this from the first stop in Washington DC. What I saw online before leaving Switzerland was, it’s snowing in Colorado. Ski resorts open soon. Like I said, life is good.

Greg

PS: Since I gave you all a restaurant recommendation for Amsterdam, I might as well be globally impartial and do the same for Zurich and London. In Zurich, there is an old armory right at the heart of the most charming part of the city that has only been around since five years before Columbus. But trust me, the food is fresh. And deliciously Swiss. It is “Zeughauskeller,” at Bahnhofstrasse 28a, phone 044 211 2690, www.zeughauskeller.ch. And, London. Mind you, anyone London-bound can send to me for “Greg’s Guide to London,” but I had a particularly wonderful experience this week at a French restaurant called “Le Cellier du Midi.” It was wonderful because the restaurant is in Carol’s and my old neighborhood of Hampstead, and we used to go to this place when we lived in London. The wonderful thing is, after all these years, it is just as good as it ever was. 28 Church Row, London NW3. 020 7435 9998. www.LeCellierDuMidi.com.

Read Greg’s new book “Life in the Wrong Lane,”
available at bookstores everywhere.

Life in the Wrong Lane by Greg Dobbs

BoomerCafé co-founder and executive editor Greg Dobbs has a new book out. It is called “Life in the Wrong Lane,” because that’s where Greg — a longtime producer, then correspondent for ABC News, now a correspondent for HDNet Television — has spent most of his life: in the wrong lane, trying to get into places when smart, normal people are trying to get out. He thinks you older boomers might appreciate this excerpt from his coverage of the Indian occupation of Wounded Knee, when he and a cameraman named Art were trying to sneak into the besieged South Dakota settlement at night.

The sky had cleared. There was snow on the ground, but a starry sky and a bit of moonlight. In case you think that’s good news, think again. It wasn’t bright enough to actually help us see the barbed wire. It was just bright enough to make Art and me stand out against the white snow. That meant we had to stay just below the ridgelines if we could, even though that’s where the drifts of snow were deepest. But if we didn’t, we were sitting ducks. Or hiking ducks, if anyone was watching.

The trouble with crossing through barbed wire at night, with or without snow on the ground, is that you never know whether you’ve merely climbed to the other side, or crawled into something. This fact didn’t occur to me until we did precisely that.

We had crossed through three or four barbed wire fences uneventfully. It wasn’t easy because at each one, I’d have to put my equipment down in the snow, crawl through while Art held the strands apart, take each piece of gear Art handed me over the top, hold the strands apart for him to crawl through, then pick everything up and start out again.

This time though, we never got that far. I put everything down and with Art’s help, crawled through. But before I could grab hold of the first piece of gear, something grabbed hold of me. A dog. He had my cuff in his mouth. In an instant, several more were barking wildly and racing to join the fun. I could hardly see them, but I didn’t need a good look to have a fair idea where I was. It was some kind of dog pen, and all the dogs were all over me, growling and barking and snapping at my pants.

Greg Dobbs

I’ll tell you this: you can get through a barbed wire fence mighty fast when you want to. Just grab the top strand with your gloved hands, pull it down, and pull yourself over. You will lose a little skin. But that’s better than losing a leg. And you don’t even need Art’s help.

After that, we were scared. Not just that we might stumble into another dog pen, but that there surely must be some feds hotfooting it toward the noise of the dogs. So we decided to get as far from the pen as possible, as fast as we could.

What that meant was, we couldn’t carry on along the hidden ridgelines. We’d have to cut straight across the reflective fields and take our chances. That’s when we got caught.

The first sign was maybe a hundred yards ahead of us, at the top of a hill, silhouetted in the dark night. A lone figure, erect, like a statue at the top of a treeless slope, the barrel of his rifle standing out against the night sky. He seemed to be peering right down at us. If he was a fed, he was just waiting to clamp on the cuffs.

We stopped short and whispered to each other. Fed, or Indian, or angry rancher? No way to know. But it didn’t really matter. Whoever he was, he wasn’t acting real friendly.

We could cut fast to the left or right and hope to outrun him. We were weighted down with tens of thousands of dollars in camera equipment, but who knows? Maybe in this deep snow, we could move just as fast as he could.

And maybe we couldn’t. Furthermore, outrunning him might not be our biggest risk. What if he shoots at us? Could we outrun the bullet?

So we decided to surrender. After all, if he was an Indian, he’d probably help lead us back to Wounded Knee. If he was a rancher, he’d probably read us the riot act and tell us to get the hell off his land. And if he was a fed, well, we were just journalists. Sure, we were trespassing, and sure, we had illegally crossed a government barrier, but if this was an agent, what would the government do to us except slap our hands and send us home?

“We’re journalists and we’re not armed.” I tried to keep my voice calm as we took maybe a dozen steps in his direction. But he was calmer than I was; he hardly moved. And he didn’t say a single word back to us. So now, Art spoke.

“I’m Art Levy. I’m a cameraman for TVN. My partner is Greg Dobbs. He’s a producer for ABC.” And with that, we took another dozen steps toward our captor.

But he didn’t respond. Nor move. We could still make out the shape of the rifle’s barrel.

“We’ll put our hands in the air, just to show you we mean no harm.” Art seemed to have the right idea now. Just as we could only see this guy in silhouette, maybe that’s how he saw us. And all our protruding equipment, which just as easily could have looked to him like weapons as TV gear. Picture me, walking along with this long tripod sticking out front. In the darkness of the night, it looks like a long gun. “Just give us a few seconds to put all our equipment down.”

We set everything down in the snow. That should reassure him. And we put our arms in the air. That should too. And we took a few more steps. He didn’t take even one. This was beginning to worry us. It’s bad enough to get arrested. Worse still to be captured by some nut with other things in mind. But that was how it seemed to be shaping up.

“Look.” My turn again. “We’re going to keep coming toward you, slowly, unless you tell us to stop. And we’ll keep our arms in the air. But we want you to see us, and we want to show you our press credentials, and show you that we don’t have any weapons.”

He didn’t say not to, so we began stepping through the deep snow. One tall step after another, closer and closer to the mysteriously still and silent figure. Remember, it’s a dark night. We’d have to be nearly nose to nose to make out more than just his shape.

Which is what it took. It wasn’t until Art and I were just a couple of yards from this stoic figure that we could see that he wasn’t an Indian. Or a rancher. Or a federal agent.

This guy had four legs. We were surrendering to a Black Angus bull. With a long horn that stood out above his head like a rifle.

We were so shaken, we apologized.

It’s easy to order Greg’s new book. Click here – Life in the Wrong Lane

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“Sick.” That’s what my baseball team, the red-hot Colorado Rockies, are calling themselves these days: “sick.” They’ve even printed it on t-shirts they’re wearing around the clubhouse: four big, bold, black letters in the center of the chest: “SICK.”

If someone’s young — like, pre-baby boomer — sick’s a good thing. But I’m a boomer — one of the oldest boomers — and have pretty much gone through life believing there was nothing good about being sick. Come to think of it, the last time I’m aware that anyone with the Rockies was “sick” was when superstar shortstop Troy Tulowitzki missed a game with the flu. That was the one game in our last home stand during the wildcard race against the Giants that we lost.

Of course this really isn’t much different than when I was young and said something was “really cool.” That probably made my mom stop and think, “Hmm, he thinks it’s cool. Should I be turning up the heat?” Which reminds me, wasn’t there also a time when “hot” didn’t mean someone sexy?

Mind you, it’s all evolutionary. I’ll bet when my dear parents helped make “groovy” verbally vogue, their own parents’ hair stood on end. Language is meant to evolve. Some languages don’t, but ours does. Big-time. That’s why Merriam-Webster issues a brand new dictionary every ten years. In the last edition, one synonym for “good” was “bad.” Go figure.

But still, I haven’t quite come to terms with every change in our common-use vocabulary. Like the word “awesome.” That should apply — at least in the mind of this old fogy — to the Grand Canyon, the space shuttle, the Taj Mahal. They are nothing less than awesome. Totally awesome.

But as I write this, I’m in Florida to cover the latest launch of the totally awesome space shuttle, and on two consecutive days, when I’ve had a couple of spare hours, I’ve done what I do every time I’m here. I’ve gone to a local surf shop in Cocoa Beach and rented a bike. Don’t ask why a surf shop rents bikes, because that’s not the point of the story. And don’t ask why anyone would be dumb enough to rent a bike when the temperature is in the 90s and there’s humidity to match.

The point of the story is, when you rent a bike here, they protect their huge investment in a fleet of rusty old beach bikes that have no gears, old-fashioned foot brakes, and chains that come off half the time, by taking an imprint of your credit card as a deposit and making a photocopy of your driver’s license.

So on the second day I was here, since I was renting same bike, I gave the young woman behind the counter the imprint and the photocopy she had returned to me from the day before, so she wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of making new ones. And what do you think she called my thoughtful deed? “Awesome.” Maybe when Einstein handed someone his famous formula for the relationship between energy and matter, they rightly said, “Awesome.” When Neil Armstrong handed in the soil he brought back from the moon, “awesome” would have worked just fine. But for holding onto copies of my license and my credit card? Not so much.

What scares me is, language is losing meaning, and the post-baby-boomers are the ones who are behind it. Just as “sick” should be reserved for something bad, “awesome” should be reserved for something great. If we aren’t satisfied with the words we have, let’s just come up with new words, rather than adulterating the old ones. How about “fabumarkable?” Or, “incredisational.” Of course maybe, when we want to describe an act or an object that really is awesome, we ought to just use a word we already have, a word that already means something really terrific: “sick.”

Check out Greg’s new book – “Life in the Wrong Lane.” It’s all about life as a television news correspondent, and it is … like, totally cool.

Greg Dobbs on HDNet

Late Monday night (actually Tuesday morning in Florida), I’ll be on the air again from the Kennedy Space Center with the launch of space shuttle Discovery. Liftoff is set for 1:36:02 AM EDT Tuesday morning (yes, you read that right, it is timed to the tenth of a second), so we’ll broadcast from 1 AM to 2 AM EDT Tuesday, which is midnight to 1 AM Central Time, 11 PM to midnight Monday night in the Mountain Time Zone and 10-11 PM in the Pacific.

If you’re thinking about the six-count-em-six delays last time for Endeavour … so am I! It took me only three trips to Florida to see that baby go up. But two pieces of good news for NASA: the countdown started last night and so far, so good. And, NASA’s weather experts put the odds of a launch at 70%. I’ve seen them go up when the odds weren’t half that good.

Although it’s not the primary piece of cargo, one of the devices Discovery is carrying to space is the COLBERT treadmill, which is named after Stephen Colbert. You might remember reading that he staged a write-in from his viewers during NASA’s contest to name the newest U.S. module on the International Space Station. He won, but NASA wasn’t willing to go that far; the second-place entry, “Tranquility,” got the nod. However, with about as much humor as you can expect from a government agency, they decided to put his name on the treadmill. But only by doing what anyone might expect them to do: they turned it into an acronym. So, COLBERT stands for “Combined Operational Load-Bearing External Resistance Treadmill.”

~ Greg

HDNet covers all shuttle launches live. It’s on DirecTV, Dish Network, Comcast (in most of the country) and most other cable systems in the US and Canada.

Greg’s new book, “Life in the Wrong Lane,” has just been published by iUniverse and will soon be available at book sellers everywhere. It’s the inside scoop on life and adventures as a television correspondent.

Neda

By David Henderson -

Much of the world has kept track of events in Iran following the questionable outcome of elections there on June 12 via Twitter. With severe restrictions by the regime in Iran on media coverage and apathy by the news media in the West, Twitter has served to redefine how many of us view the concept of media in the Internet era.

Nothing has been more profound, in my opinion, than watching video of a young woman named Neda Soltan die on the streets of Tehran yesterday. She was a student of philosophies at Tehran University. According to reports, she was shot by a police sniper while standing with her father or university professor, watching protesters.

Neda Soltan

The video is haunting, especially her last moment alive when she looked at the camera as if to seek our help. At least that was what I saw in her eyes.

The story of Neda is being heard around the world today, carried first by people, sharing on Twitter and online. We no longer living in an era when some editor or TV producer makes decisions for us but rather we are sharing information and drawing our own conclusions.

My feeling is that the image and memory of Neda will endure as an icon, a reminder that we must not permit innocence and peace to be destroyed by tyranny and corruption.

Just let me share this prayer for Neda and others in Iran today.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By Greg Dobbs -

Maybe Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fixed the election. But we have to ponder another plausible possibility: maybe he didn’t.

Why not? Because maybe he didn’t have to. He runs a repressive and dangerous regime, his police forces have brutally put down their own countrymen, and we’d love to see him ousted. But we might not speak for the majority of the president’s fellow citizens. History is my guide.

The first of many trips that I took to Iran for ABC News to cover the revolution, then the hostage crisis, was more than 30 years ago. With insurgents at his heels, the Shah was hanging on by a thread. The United States stuck with him because he still had some local support, but to virtually every journalist covering the run-up to the revolution, that support was pencil-thin. Generally the Shah’s backers were the rich and the educated. However, most Iranians were neither rich nor educated, and got no benefit from their authoritarian leader’s friendship with the West. Had there been an election in those days, the Shah’s challenger Ayatollah Khomeini wouldn’t have had to fix it. He’d have won hands-down.

In the three decades since, things have changed for the Persian people, some for better and some for worse. The suppressive violence surrounding Iran’s elections notwithstanding, there has been more free speech and open protest in recent years than we used to see under the Shah. What’s more, popular discontent with the country’s president is not primarily because of his radical rhetoric. No, it is mainly because of the economy; he has not figured out how to corral Iran’s rich resources.

The point is, just because we in the West detest somebody in the Third World doesn’t mean everyone within his own borders detests him. Or even most of them. The same Iranians who put Khomeini on a bandwagon and climbed aboard to ride it into the Islamic Republic are the ones who voted for Ahmadinejad. Does he command a majority today? Who knows, and anyway, the answer might now be moot, because the anger today on the streets of Tehran transcends the outcome of the election. But while the protests have been hugely impressive and impressively huge, all they prove is that Mir Hossein Moussavi, the comparative moderate who believes he should have won and we wish had won, has passionate support. Or perhaps more accurately, the notion of reform has passionate support, and Moussavi — like AyatollahKhomeini three decades earlier — is the messenger.

A close parallel is a recall election I covered a few years ago in Venezuela, this time for HDNet Television’s “World Report.” It was Hugo Chavez who was under fire, but the rich and educated weren’t in his camp; they wanted him out. I’ll never forget election day itself: we went to one well-to-do voting precinct in Caracas where the line of citizens waiting in the broiling sun to expel their president stretched for half a mile, which made me think the recall would work. But then we went to a sprawling slum, the kind of place where Chavez had bought support with his populist policies. The line was just as long, maybe longer. Sure enough, when the results were in, Chavez had beaten the recall. The Carter Center was down there too, and whether right or wrong, they confirmed the integrity of the outcome. Chavez’s opponents cried foul, but frankly reminded me of the Manhattan socialite who, after John Kerry’s bruising defeat in 2004 to George W. Bush, infamously said something like, “I just don’t understand it; I don’t know anyone who voted for Bush.”

Having covered stories in more than 80 countries, I have seen American foreign policy at its best and at its worst and at its worst, it assumes that people everywhere want what we want. They don’t. In some parts of the world, they want the kinds of rulers, and sometimes even political systems, that we condemn. The best example of that might be the Gaza Strip, which I’ve also covered for HDNet. The U.S. rightly encouraged free and open Palestinian elections; in Gaza, the terrorist group Hamas won. If that doesn’t teach us something, nothing will. We should shout out for the right of Iranians to demonstrate without consequences. And we should fight for Iran’s elections to be fair, but should not assume that if they are, we will like the outcome.